Tag Archives: Larry Smith

There are news reports Mr. Flynn has allegedly been “flipped” and will likely be giving damaging testimony against associates of President Trump who worked on behalf of his election. I seriously doubt that anything said in a court of law is going to result in Trump resigning, and as long as Congress is controlled by the GOP, does anyone believe that he would actually be impeached?

In fact, to be blunt, impeaching Trump would not really solve anything. Pence is no better. “Even mad chief need sane lieutenants,” said Hayden Carruth in a poem about “Adolf.” The only way to stop the madness in which those are who wealthy disclaim any responsibility for the health and well-being of their fellow citizens is to alter the party in power in Congress in 2018, and at least bring to a halt the dismantling of the social safety net. It will not be possible to rebuild what is being torn apart until at least 2022, but we can minimize the damages that will accumulate between now and then, if and only if we vote in sufficient numbers to change an unbalanced system.

The best analysis I have read of our situation can be found in Larry Smith’s latest edition of the Caliban Chronicles, and I urge you to read it. The only “friendly amendment” I would attach to Larry’s call to action is that the Baby Boomer generation is far too susceptible to the illusion that changes in Social Security and Medicare will most likely affect the next generation. Hey, folks: that’s the plan. First, the next generation is asked to make “adjustments,” and then they will come after the Baby Boomers and demand that they, too, reduce the economic returns on their lifetime of hard work.

Consider the following:
The United States is already facing a gloomy fiscal landscape. The federal deficit this year topped $660 billion, despite healthy economic growth, and the national debt now exceeds $20 trillion. Janet L. Yellen, the outgoing chairwoman of the Federal Reserve, appointed by President Barack Obama, warned last week that the national debt “is the type of thing that should keep people awake at night.”

The “Grand Off-shore Party” knows that the secret of political domination is to divide the opposition, and their plan is to fuse the resentment of Generation X and the Millennials over their “raw deal” and cause them to band together in viewing the Baby Boomers as their “enemy.” Unfortunately, Bernie Sanders’s campaign failed to see that his proposals about assisting each block of these voters was widening this generational split at an early point in this crisis. Sanders played right into the hands of the GOP’s long-term strategy.

“Echolocation,” a portion of my long poem “Barely Holding Distant Things Apart,” has just been published in issue #27 of CALIBAN magazine, edited by Larry Smith. While a print version of the title poem appeared in ASYLUM magazine, edited by Greg Boyd, the video version that includes the collaboration with sculptor Mineko Grimmer, is available on-line. Other contributors to this new issue of CALIBAN include Anthony Seidman, James Grabill, Ray Gonzalez, Cathie Sandstrom, Jeff Harrison, Guy R. Beining, Andrew Joron, Timothy Liu, Karen Garthe, Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, Gerald Vizenor, and George Kalamaras.

Larry Smith sent me a notice last night that issue number 17 of Caliban magazine is now on-line. This particular issue includes one of my personal favorites of all the poems I have ever written, “Speed Ratios.” The issue includes not only poetry but some extraordinary visual art, too.